Cristina Odone is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith. She is the director of communications for the Legatum institute and is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. She is married and lives in west London with her husband, two stepsons and a daughter. Her new ebook No God Zone is now available on Kindle.

It's time to protect boys as well as girls from the barbaric practice of circumcision

I blame our cultural hypocrisy. The practice of female genital mutilation is widely embraced by African and Middle Eastern tribes (Muslim, Christian, animist alike) while male circumcision is a Judeao-Christian tradition widely practised in the Middle East but also in America. We associate the former with deepest darkest Africa, tribal violence and misogyny; while the latter speaks to us of Abrahamic and Puritan traditions and elderly men with flowing white beards, all of which we are much more comfortable with.

The World Health Organisation warns that three million girls are at risk each year of some kind of female genital cutting. In certain African countries (Somalia and Egypt) over 95 per cent of women have undergone some kind of circumcision. "Some kind" covers incisions ranging from a superficial cut of the clitoral prepuce, done under medical supervision, to the deep cut to the clitoris that a village woman will perform with a piece of broken glass. Defenders of the practice claim it is religious in nature – though you will have noticed that no Christian cleric in Europe has ever called for this barbarity. Critics counter that female circumcision is a patriarchal means of controlling women's sexuality, as the operation is supposed to curb female sexual appetite and pleasure. Their claim is undermined by the lucrative industry that has sprung up in Beverly Hills (and elsewhere): Western women are going in for labioplasty, the de-hooding of the clitoris to lengthen and increase sexual pleasure.

Male circumcision affects about 750 million males, according to the WHO. As in female circumcision, the range of procedures ranges from the surgeon's careful incision to the village imam or rabbi operating on the child without anaesthetic. Our forefathers cut the foreskin invoking religious reasons; but theirs too was a puritanical obsession: they believed it would stop masturbation, curb sexual pleasure, and reduce appetite. They were right, up to a point: the circumcised penis is less sensitive than the uncircumcised one, as an article in the BMJ recently revealed. Defenders of THIS practice claim it stems the spread of HIV and some sexually transmitted diseases – though sexual relationships are many years down the line for those infants being ritually (literally) abused.

Children of both sexes should be spared these barbaric practices. But while preventing female circumcision is a global political campaign, embraced by feminists of all faiths and none, no one seriously addresses the issue of male circumcision. Dena Davis, the legal consultant for the American Academy of Paediatrics, criticises this policy as nonsense. It reflects, as she told The Economist this week, cultural prejudice rather than medical knowledge.

It would seem that although we cannot understand cutting a little girl, we can watch someone cutting an infant boy's foreskin, and feel we are not leaving our comfort zone.